Monthly Archives: June 2014

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In the 80s, it was reasonably common to have stories about a person being transported to “the world inside a computer”. The most famous example was Tron, but there were a few others, such as a gamebook called The Video Avenger.

I think it’s kind of weird that we don’t have this any more. Firstly because computer games look a lot more like real places now:

Apparently it's easier to imagine that this is a real place...

...than this.

(not to mention that the ‘first-person’ view is much more common), and secondly because the internet means you can interact with other people as if you were ‘in the game world’.

Last year I finished a long poem called ‘Telelee’, about visitors from Earth to the fantasy city (or a version of it anyway). I hoped that Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, which has published a couple of my shorter poems, might be interested in publishing it. However HFQ has had it since November last year and, as they haven’t responded to my follow-up email, I think they might have ceased to exist.

Since most poetry magazines pay ‘by the poem’ rather than by the word, there are very few potential markets for it.

So I’m planning to contact another potential market next month. If that doesn’t work, I’ll go straight to self-publishing.

I’m planning to publish the poem along with the short stories I’ve written set in Telelee, most of which were in The New Death and others.

I’m also considering including ‘The Encyclopedia of Telelee’: that is, the things I’ve posted on my blog about the city, edited, cross-referenced and put into alphabetical order. I’m interested to know whether people would find this interesting, or see this as self-indulgent ‘let me tell you about my setting’. Please let me know in the comments.

Confession of a Bounty Hunter and My Name Is John Carter.

I have another finished and unpublished long poem, this time set in the old West. This has even fewer potential magazines than ‘Telelee’, because it isn’t fantasy.

I’m planning to put this one out, along with a couple of other poems set in the old West that are in They Say the Sirens…, and one other, as soon as I write the one other.

I have an abandoned, unfinished verse version of A Princess of Mars, which emphasizes John Carter’s life before Mars. I’m considering rewriting what I’ve done to make it the fourth poem for this publication. However this is ‘in the queue’. I’m currently working on…

Once Upon a Time In Araby

A non-fantasy long poem set in a not-very-historical version of ancient Arabia. Given that, as I’ve already discussed, long poems are very hard to get into magazines, this one will probably end up going straight to self-publishing as well (I seem to have a tendency to be good at things the less commercial they are).

The Case of the Syphilitic Sister and The Adventure of the Resurrected Nobleman

These are unfinished works of prose.

The first is a combination of detective novel and superhero story (via Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Top 10). I’ve written about 10,000 words of this.

The second is a short story in which Sherlock Holmes meets Dracula. However the tone is more serious than that makes it sound. It’s mainly inspired by Neil Gaiman’s A Study In Emerald, which combines Sherlock Holmes with the Cthulhu Mythos.

A while ago I made Under the Moons of Mars, which was…OK. As I was making it, I found myself less and less happy with using d6 Shooters as a base, and more and more interested in ‘choose your own adventure’-like paragraphs.

I’d like to make a game which would be similar to Barbarian Prince, although with a more original setting, clearer rules, and more variety of characters and encounters. This would use the things I liked from Under the Moons of Mars, along with various other ideas that I’ve either come up with or found in my reading.

I was hoping to pitch this game to Heroic Fantasy Quarterly but, as I said, I think it’s ceased publication (or at least taken a long break). I could pitch it to other fantasy magazines, but I think HFQ was more likely to take it.

It could be put out on computer, and/or in print. The latter would, of course, require some crowd-funding.

Anyway this is probably something I’ll look at after all the other things mentioned above have been dealt with.